Dielectric breakdown is a sudden and catastrophic increase in the conductivity of an
insulator caused by electrical stress. It is one of the major reliability issues in electronic …

Reliability challenges of candidate metal systems to replace traditional Cu wiring in future
interconnects are discussed. From a reliability perspective, a key opportunity is …

Interconnect resistance and reliability have emerged as critical factors limiting the
performance of advanced CMOS circuits. With the slowdown of transistor scaling …

We evaluate the dielectric reliability performance of 21 nm pitch interconnects integrated in a
dense low-k and using a barrierless Ru fill scheme. We show our line-to-line and tip-to-tip …

Time dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) properties of cobalt and ruthenium
interconnects were investigated in 36 nm pitch dual damascene test vehicles. We …

Abstract Cobalt (Co) and ruthenium (Ru) have been proposed for novel metallization
schemes to replace copper in next generation BEOL systems that will use ultra-thin oxide …

We evaluate the reliability of Mo as word line metal for 3-D NAND Flash devices, by
mimicking the stacked architecture using planar capacitors with SiO 2/Al 2 O 3 and SiO …

In this work, we evaluate the scaling limits of inter-word line oxides for 3D NAND Flash
devices. We test different oxide stacks by mimicking the stacked architecture using planar …

For the first time a non-invasive localisation of a soft breakdown (SBD) is shown. The
localisation is completed on fully functional back end of line (BEOL) test structures. The test …

We are able to localize dielectric soft break downs (SBD) in porous low k materials with
photon emission measurements. Up to now it was only possible to isolate hard breakdowns …